Wednesday, April 8, 2009

According to figures released by the National Statistical Office in 2007, teenagers between 15 and 19 on average sent a whopping 60.1 text messages per day, a slight increase from 59.5 in 2005.Young adults aged between 20 and 24 also send more text messages, with the average number of SMS increasing from 22.6 in 2005 to 30.9 in 2006. I send about 10-15 text messages a day and I already think that's a lot! I think I've developed a texting thumb now haha

I only text in English (of course), but there are some interesting facts about texting in Korean. They don't use spaces. ItsurewouldsavealotofspacesinceIonlyhavealimitof90characters! They can type without even looking down at the keys! Annnnd they use a TON of emoticons! I really get a kick out of how many emoticons Koreans use when they text! At home, I've never really used any (of what I call) "Asian" emoticons... but here, I see at least one in every text message. The most common one used by both guys and girls (that I find to be quite girly) is ^^. It's supposed to be "grinning eyes"... happiness. I've even started to use it quite often! haha it looks cute.Popular variations.. ^_^, ^.^, ^-^.. etc.

Some of the emoticons my cell phone comes with:

\\(^-^)// yay! Arms up in the air.*^.~*@0@d^o^bthumbs up!o(>.(-(-.(-.-).-)-)dizzy?T_Tso sad... crying

I like it.. it really puts emotions (hence, emoticon) into text msgs whereas at home, unless you know the person, text messages are usually dead-sounding.

A lot of Koreans are not familiar with terms like lol (laugh out loud), lmao, rotfl.. etc. so I taught them. They taught me OTL. I don't think it stands for anything, but it's written to show a person's disappointment or frustration.

Koreans don't use "haha" - they use "kk" or "ㅋㅋㅋ" (that's the Korean character for the sound k).. or if they're snickering from teasing, they'd put a lot of them like "kkkkkkkㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ" or "hh"/"ㅎㅎ" which is like hehe.

Cell phones in Korea are called 헨드폰- hendeupon (handphone).

When you answer a phone call, you say "yeobosayo?" (as in, hello?). But then, the person on the other side just starts talking about the purpose of their call! They hardly ever ask how each other is doing.. and a lot of them don't even know the proper way to respond in English. In person, you would say "anyonghaseyo" as a greeting. It really means "hello, how are you?", but Koreans never literally respond saying "I'm good, thanks". I learned in Korean language class that people also ask each "ohdee-ehkayo?" which means "where are you going?" as a polite greeting... but they often don't answer that directly either.

What I still can't get over is how Koreans end their calls. I'm often left hanging and thinking to myself 'did he just hang up on me without saying bye?!'... how rude! But everyone does it unless they're saying goodnight. It's almost a mutual 'bye'. Sometimes they go 'neeeeeeh' which means yes as their goodbye. Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh.